Palyne

This morning my kid as usual didn’t want to get up and hadn’t picked out her clothes as she’s supposed to and changed her mind twice and was late, late, nagging, reminding, stomping bellowing if you don’t get your butt out here right this minute young lady late, and I really just wanted to say forget it, who cares, school this week (its last week) is nothing but play anyway so why should it matter if you’re there, I’m so tired I just want to go back to bed.

But I acted like it was important to me because everyone knows the minute you become an adult you think school is a deeply valuable experience and punctuality is next to godliness.

I stopped by the store in the morning to get a couple bottles of Diet Mountain Dew. I really needed caffeine in a big way. I didn’t want to get out of the car and go in front of the morning pre-work rush at the local gas-station/store. I hate it when people see me. If I had my way I’d live in a freakin’ cave so I didn’t feel like every human who looked at me got that “oh-my-god-she’s-huge” look in their eyes.

But I went in and shopped and pretended I didn’t care.

o0o

Sometimes, I feel like I spend more time acting-like-something than a professional actor.

Granted, our culture puts us in a place where we must, sometimes; civilization is a thin veneer of let’s-pretend on top of the world of animals we basically are.

But between being massively overweight and being on a lowcarb eating plan, it seems like there are so many more options for pretending.

Recently on the lowcarber.org forum, there was a thread about whether people were “out of the closet” about being on a lowcarb eating plan. The majority of the people (so far) actually said that they didn’t openly say so, and plenty of them suggested a variety of subterfuge, convenient phrasings, and minor sins of omission, they say instead.

Why? Because they got tired of being harrassed, of getting spontaneous, if completely ignorant, over-opinionated dietary advice from everybody, because they didn’t feel like explaining it, because it was easier to just say X and let it be at that, etc. The person who started the thread said something like, “No wonder so many think lowcarb is dead, if most the people on it are in the closet about it!”

They’re just pretending. They’re eating salad and calling it not very hungry. They’re skipping the bread and dessert and calling it “cutting back on sugars and starches.” They’re claiming they’re allergic, they’re hypoglycemic, they’re diabetic, all kinds of things, just to get people to shut up and let it be already.

How much do we pretend? How much is necessary?

I pretend to have energy when I don’t, that’s a constant. Lowcarb helps with that by giving me a massive amount more than I ever have off it. Of course, it’s still not really enough to get someone my size bouncing off the walls, but it’s certainly more than usual.